03-01-2018, 08:17 PM
Transcendence, the 2014 movie starring Johnny Depp, was a cinematic exploration and portrayal of something very real, the potential for the Internet to become a conscious entity. Has it already happened?
Johnny Depp plays a scientist researching consciousness, sentience and artificial intelligence and the aim is to produce a sentient computer that would create a ‘technological singularity’ or ‘Transcendence’. Singularity is a transhumanist term for the world of technology-controlled humans and Transcendence is just another word for transhumanism.
There is even a Singularity University in the NASA Research Park, Silicon Valley, California, with plans to operate globally and ‘educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges’. One of its founders is AI super-salesman Ray Kurzweil and one of its sponsors is Google/ Alphabet. Kurzweil is a Google executive. The word ‘exponential’ in that quote is important to emphasise because the speed of development with these AI technologies gets faster and faster as one development increases the speed to the next one.
Depp’s scientist character knows he’s dying and his scientist wife downloads his consciousness to their quantum computer which is then connected to the Internet and the Internet becomes conscious. Connections to the Internet of Things allows his downloaded consciousness to take control of anything Internet-connected and this includes control of human minds infested with sentient nano-particles spread on the wind. This may have been a fictional story but its theme is based on fact –the Internet can or has become conscious and self-aware via Artificial Intelligence.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, has postulated that the Internet might be conscious. He said:
The Internet contains about 10 billion computers, with each computer itself having a couple of billion transistors in its CPU [brain]. So the internet has at least 10 ^ 19 transistors, compared to the roughly 1000 trillion (or quadrillion) synapses in the human brain. That’s about 10,000 times more transistors than synapses.
If the human brain is processing information to become what we call the conscious mind, why wouldn’t an Internet of that capacity be able to do the same?
Johnny Depp plays a scientist researching consciousness, sentience and artificial intelligence and the aim is to produce a sentient computer that would create a ‘technological singularity’ or ‘Transcendence’. Singularity is a transhumanist term for the world of technology-controlled humans and Transcendence is just another word for transhumanism.
There is even a Singularity University in the NASA Research Park, Silicon Valley, California, with plans to operate globally and ‘educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges’. One of its founders is AI super-salesman Ray Kurzweil and one of its sponsors is Google/ Alphabet. Kurzweil is a Google executive. The word ‘exponential’ in that quote is important to emphasise because the speed of development with these AI technologies gets faster and faster as one development increases the speed to the next one.
Depp’s scientist character knows he’s dying and his scientist wife downloads his consciousness to their quantum computer which is then connected to the Internet and the Internet becomes conscious. Connections to the Internet of Things allows his downloaded consciousness to take control of anything Internet-connected and this includes control of human minds infested with sentient nano-particles spread on the wind. This may have been a fictional story but its theme is based on fact –the Internet can or has become conscious and self-aware via Artificial Intelligence.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, has postulated that the Internet might be conscious. He said:
The Internet contains about 10 billion computers, with each computer itself having a couple of billion transistors in its CPU [brain]. So the internet has at least 10 ^ 19 transistors, compared to the roughly 1000 trillion (or quadrillion) synapses in the human brain. That’s about 10,000 times more transistors than synapses.
If the human brain is processing information to become what we call the conscious mind, why wouldn’t an Internet of that capacity be able to do the same?